→ April 20, 2011
→ By

Taft.

Just recorded my one Baseball Today podcast of the week – I’ve had to skip two due to early-morning flights. Also, Thursday’s chat will take place after I get off the College Baseball Live set, at either 7:30 pm or 8 pm EDT, because (weather permitting) I’m seeing Javier Baez play at the usual chat time.

—

In an afterword to her second novel, Taft, Ann Patchett laments its status as her least-known novel even though she’s extremely fond of it, a situation she credits to everything from the title (admittedly not the optimal choice) to the way it was superseded by her later works, notably the mesmerizing Bel Canto. But Taft showcases Patchett’s skill for characterization as well as her beautiful yet readable prose, and compares favorably to the novels that came before and after it. (Her most recent novel, Run, was by far her worst effort.)

The Taft of the book’s title is already dead before the book begins. Ray Taft was a husband and father of two in a rural town in eastern Tennessee who died of a heart attack, leaving his family emotionally adrift and buried in bills. His wife, daughter, and son move to Memphis to live with their wealthy aunt and uncle, but the daughter, Fay, chooses to work and ends up in the bar run by the narrator, former blues drummer John Nickel, a black man more than ten years her senior. Nickel gives Fay a job and ends up enmeshed in her new domestic drama, largely revolving around her brother, Carl, for whom the loss of his father has meant the loss of an anchor and a descent into increasingly serious trouble. Meanwhile, Nickel himself is grappling with his own loss, as his ex-girlfriend has moved to Miami with their seven-year-old son, Franklin, leaving him with limited contact with his only child.

The present-day stories of Fay/Carl and Nickel/Franklin are interrupted by what are either flashbacks or Nickel’s own interpolations of Taft’s story, including the switch in Fay’s and Carl’s personalities after their father’s death and a poignant scene where Taft interacts with a local boy selling candy door to door to raise money for his school science class.

If there’s a reason for Taft‘s relative lack of success, it might be that the book seemed less substantial than her other novels. The Patron Saint of Liars revolved around a terribly broken woman and the daughter she is destined to disappoint. The Magician’s Assistant is about a woman dealing with the death of her longtime business partner, who could never requite her affection for him. Bel Canto is a masterpiece, a story of hostages and terrorists in a Latin American embassy where, over time, the barrier between captor and captive begins to break down. Major things happen in Taft – if you’re familiar with Chekhov, you’ll see the biggest event coming a mile away – but the results aren’t that different from what preceded the big stuff. Characters aren’t much changed, and little is resolved at the end of the book. I was fine with that because it’s a well-written slice of life, but if you like your novels to come with firm beginnings and ends and a cherry on top, this isn’t the book for you. And that’s fine too.

Next up: Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. She might have been the original Debbie Downer.

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→ March 28, 2011
→ By

Dog Soldiers.

Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers won the National Book Award in 1974 and made the TIME 100 ranking, although I haven’t seen or heard it mentioned outside of that context. I’m going to guess it’s because the subject matter and setting feel very dated, making its relevance to today’s reader a lot less obvious, but that didn’t make it a less interesting read for me.

The book is populated by hippies, cheats, losers, dropouts, and freaks, set in the waning days of the Vietnam War and the dissolute California society of the age. John Converse is a writer/journalist of dubious credentials based in Vietnam who allows himself to get roped into a transoceanic heroin deal using a friend he calmly describes as “a psychopath” and his own wife as part of the supply chain. When the psychopath, Ray Hicks, and Converse’s wife Marge connect in California it sets off a chase by some bad guys who moonlight as good guys on their days off and an increasingly desperate and irrational attempt to sell the drugs in territory controlled by other suppliers.

Along the way, there’s a healthy dose of unhealthy drug consumption, copious vomiting, and more than a smidgen of violence. Ray and Marge end up in a hippie commune with the dope and more weapons than a Libyan rebel camp, while Converse tries to avoid the dirty cop who wants to bust Ray and Marge but take the drugs for himself. It’s a nihilistic, unsparing look at compromised people descending into a hell of their own making.

Aside from my inability to really place myself in the story – I’ve never tried a drug stronger than alcohol, unless you count chocolate, which I do – I struggled to find a deeper theme below the story. Maybe the heroin isn’t really heroin, but symbolized something deeper, like a search for meaning in something consumable and disposable like money. Maybe the battle over the heroin stands in as a metaphor for the war, a conflict with questionable and short-lived objectives where the cost in lives can never be justified by the results. Maybe it’s about the fickleness of man, how quickly we’ll sell out our friends for a quick fix or financial gain. All of these occurred to me as possibilities while I was reading the book but none were fully developed as themes, leaving Dog Soldiers as a compelling read but one whose plaudits I couldn’t fully explain.

Next up: Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse.

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→ March 14, 2011
→ By

An American Tragedy.

Been busy on the draft blog, with updates on Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer, Kyle Gaedele.

—

Clyde Griffiths is dead, and it’s about freaking time already. It took Theodore Dreiser over eight hundred pages to tell a story that could have been told in under half that. An American Tragedy is an acknowledged classic, present on four of the top 100 lists I use as reading guides*, but I found it dull, thin, internally implausible (even though it’s based heavily on a true story), and populated by characters who were lucky to receive a second dimension.

*It’s #16 on the Modern Library 100, #88 on the Radcliffe 100, and on the unranked TIME 100, all of which are limited to English-language novels of the 20th century. It’s also #46 on The Novel 100, which covers all novels and is now back in print.

The story, in brief: Clyde Griffiths is raised in poverty by a pair of non-denominational missionary parents, and rejects their lifestyle and religion to strike out on his own. At every turn, his attempts to move himself forward socially and economically are stymied by his attraction to and obsession with the fairer sex. Eventually, he’s taken in by his wealthy uncle and given work in that man’s collar factory, where he meets and seduces a simple country girl, Roberta Allen. When Clyde finds that society girl Sondra Finchley is interested in him, he ditches Roberta to pursue Sondra, only to find out that Roberta is pregnant with his child and (after failed attempts to abort the baby) insists that he marry her. So he hatches a plan to kill Roberta, and Roberta ends up dead even though Clyde may have had a change of heart at the last second. He’s quickly caught, tried at great literary length, and executed. Fin.

It could easily have been a story of great drama, but it’s not. For one thing, most readers of the book know the ending, which was true when it came out because the case on which Dreiser based the novel was a national sensation, the O.J. Simpson trial of its day (except that the defendant was found guilty and executed).

It could also have been a brilliant character study, but poor Clyde is as narrow as Doug Fieger’s tie and has so little nderstanding of his own actions that it’s hard for me to make any convincing case as to his motives. The closest I could come is to label him a narcissist, since he tends to think of everything bad as happening “to him,” notably Roberta’s pregnancy which was most certainly not happening to Clyde in any physical sense.

It doesn’t even work as a polemic. At first it looks like an indictment of religion, or of Puritanism, but that falls by the wayside when Clyde leaves his parents. It could be a criticism of misspent youth, of alcohol, or of venal behavior by “loose” women, but none of those themes sticks around long either. The longest single theme is that of the caste system found in the upstate New York town where Clyde’s uncle and family live, a system that finds Clyde caught in between as the part-owner of a surname associated with success, status, and wealth but himself poor, uneducated, and socially awkward. But then Clyde kills Roberta, gets arrested, and the rich/poor issue is mostly forgotten.

If there’s anything worth pondering in An American Tragedy, it’s whether Clyde was legally guilty of the murder. Clyde sets up the entire crime, then at the last second has some sort of mental apoplexy and doesn’t quite go through with it … but Roberta falls out of the boat, Clyde probably knocks her in the head, and he definitely doesn’t bother to save her as she drowns. Is it murder if he meant it but he didn’t mean it but he meant it anyway? I sure as hell thought so, which made the trial – on which Dreiser spends the better part of 300 pages – as dull as pitcher fielding practice.

And as for the prose, well, Dryser might have been a more appropriate moniker, for the author was no magician with our language, a view to which my friends at TIME also subscribe. The prose wasn’t leaden; it was eka-leaden. To wit:

But in the interim, in connection with his relations with Roberta no least reference to Sondra, although, even when near her in the factory or her room, he could not keep his thoughts from wandering away to where Sondra in her imaginary high social world might be. The while Roberta, at moments only sensing a drift and remoteness in his thought and attitude which had nothing to do with her, was wondering what it was that of late was beginning to occupy him so completely. And he, in his turn, when she was not looking was thinking – supposing? – supposing – (since she had troubled to recall herself to him), that he could interest a girl like Sondra in him?

The whole book is like this, all 353,014 words of it. Another typical Dreiser move is the extended double negative:

Nevertheless she was not at all convinced that a girl of Roberta’s looks and practicality would not be able to negotiate an association of the sort without harm to herself.

You parse that sucker, and get back to me in a week when you’re done.

So … why did I stick it out? For one thing, because it’s on four of those book lists, and while I may not reach 100 on any of them, it pushed me one closer. But it also stood as the last unread novel from my years in school: It was originally assigned to me in my senior year of high school, in the fall of 1989. I got to page 25, hated it, bought the Cliffs Notes, and wrote the paper off that. That’s the same class for which I didn’t read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a book I went back and read in 2005 and loved. I simply can’t say the same for this paperweight.

Next up: Dr. Michael Guillen’s Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics.

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→ January 28, 2011
→ By

Breakfast at Tiffany’s & Fludd.

My list of sleeper prospects for all 30 teams went up this morning for Insiders.

—

Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella-length character study of the iconic Holly Golightly, the chameleonic protagonist whose ability to reinvent herself and manipulate people to her own benefit charms the milquetoast narrator.

Holly is a very young, independent-minded woman who takes a flat in a Manhattan brownstone where the unnamed narrator, dubbed “Fred” by Holly, also lives. She fascinates him through her force of will, her expectation that people will jump to meet her every whim (they often do), and through how men just fall hopelessly for her like dominoes in a line. (Fred’s affection for Holly always seems to be of the arm’s-length variety, and I thought the character, like Capote, was gay.) Her anchorless life hits a snag when a piece of her old life shows up out of the blue to try to drag her out of her high-society ways to a backwoods existence she never wanted in the first place.

Capote was a prose master, with Norman Mailer issuing the oft-repeated statement that he “would not have changed two words in” this story, but the line that caught my eye was because it reminded me of a television program:

…I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street Public Library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions…

I’ve tried to find out of the makers of the children’s show Between the Lions took their name from the book, but have had no success. Naming a show about literacy after a phrase from an American literary giant seems fitting, though.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is usually sold along with three Capote short stories: “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory.” The first two are ordinary, the first about a prostitute in Haiti who finds an escape to what might be a better life, the latter about two unlikely friends at a southern prison camp (one of whom is named Tico Feo, which means “ugly Costa Rican.”) The third story is a marvel, a peer to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s canon of short stories, a sweet but wholly unsentimental tale about the friendship between a young boy and an cousin in her 60s, and how the two would make and sell fruitcakes every Christmas season. We often praise players who recognize their skill sets and their limitations by saying that they “don’t try to do too much.” In “A Christmas Story,” Capote didn’t try to do too much. He lets the story do it for him.

–

Hilary Mantel’s Fludd is a strange piece of fiction, a short novel about a curate assigned to a small, backwards English town where Catholicism is practiced by means of superstition rather than faith and the priest has lost his own belief and probably his marbles as well. The curate, however, isn’t what he at first seems to be, and as the novel goes along one of the nuns emerges as the real central character despite being little more than a stock extra for the first half of the book. That character, Philomena, turns out to be the only character with any depth of anyone who populates these pages – even Fludd, the possibly-supernatural being named after a long-dead alchemist and mystic, is barely revealed, with nothing on his motives or actual thoughts – and her decision between life in the convent (which was chosen for her by her deranged mother) and the fearful world outside of it is the only major event in the entire book. There’s an anti-Catholic undertone to the book, which may bother some readers, and a subplot around idolatry and statues that went right over my head.

—

Next up: Hugh Laurie – yes, that one, House, Wooster, Jools, and so on – wrote a comic novel in 1996 called The Gun Seller. I have incredibly high expectations for this one.

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→ January 9, 2011
→ By

A Mercy.

Toni Morrison’s most recent novel, A Mercy, is extremely short, somewhere between novel and novella, and feels as wispy as a short story with both scant character development and a frenetic jumping backward and forward in time and across multiple narrators. And Morrison’s use of an apparently invented English dialect made a slow book even harder to read, leading me to the unfortunate conclusion that, as much as I loved her books Beloved and Song of Solomon (both among my 101 favorite novels), she hasn’t produced another novel that I truly enjoyed.

A Mercy is primarily about the young Angolan slave Florens, whose mother effectively gives her up to save her from potential abuse at the hands of her current owner, only to have Florens find new trouble with her next owner, the farmer and eventual trader Jacob Vaark, when she meets the unnamed free black blacksmith and falls into a torrid affair with him. She finds herself scorned by the main slave on the property, Lina, herself once used and rejected by a man; ignored by the distant, space-cadet slave named Sorrow, herself pregnant ny an unknown father; and loved then rebuffed by Jacob’s wife (and, early in the book, widow) Rebekka, who survives a bout of smallpox only to become cold and robotic after adopting the views of a Calvinist sect.

When Morrison is good, she’s superb, with long sagas that illuminate African-American history through broad metaphors and heavy use of symbolism, right down to peculiar character names like the legendary Milkman Dead of Song of Solomon. Those metaphors take time to develop over the course of many chapters and episodes, but A Mercy is so brief – when you fold up all of the narratives, very little time passes in the book – that there’s virtually no development of metaphor or character, with the only significant change affecting Rebekkah, who moves from one extreme (compassionate, freethinking, mostly independent-minded housewife-farmer) to another after losing her husband and nearly losing her own life.

White folk generally don’t come off well in Morrison’s books – when slavery is a recurrent theme, it’s hard to paint us Caucasians as anything but the enemy – but in A Mercy, the primary villain is not white skin but the Y chromosome. Man is faithless and violent and a serial user, using the various women in the book for sex and labor and little else. There is no love between man and woman in this book; the only love is that of a mother for her child, and even that goes awry more often than not. I have no inherent objection to a book with the theme of the oppression of women by men throughout the history of civilization, but to a book that attempts to tell that story without giving me a male character who exists in as many as two dimensions.

Morrison’s two magnum opi – Beloved is $9 at that amazon link above, and I doubt you could find a better novel for under $10 new right now – are among the towering achievements not just in women’s literature or African-American literature, but in literature, period, the sort of complex, emotional works that speak to multiple fundamental aspects of our existence with poetic prose, layered meanings, and narrative greed. Jazz and Sula hinted at that greatness, but in general I’ve found the rest of Morrison’s bibliography to fall sadly short. Perhaps those two great works were all that Morrison had in her. It’s more than most authors could produce in a lifetime.

Next up: So I’m a bit behind here – just tore through Kazuo Ishiguro’s marvelous debut novel A Pale View of Hills inside of 24 hours, and am already knee-deep in Benjamin Wallace’s nonfiction thriller The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.

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→ January 4, 2011
→ By

Tinkers and The Optimist’s Daughter.

Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter are both short, Pulitzer Prize-winning novels of grief and troubled family history, told from different perspectives and set in wildly different scenes. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed either of them, although in a direct comparison I’d take Welty’s folksy Southern prose over Harding’s more ponderous New England style.

Tinkers (still on sale for $5.98 at the moment) tells the story from inside the head of its protagonist as he lies on his death bed, running through his thoughts during the final hours of his life, thoughts that run to his father and his father’s father, both of whom came to earlier, more tragic ends. There’s a running theme of clocks, with wordy, dull passages from an old manual on clock manufacture and repair, but the relevance of those sections was completely lost on me. The book earned a laudatory cover quote from Marilynne Robinson, one of the great masters of American prose today, but I didn’t see Harding coming near to the standard she set with her Pulitzer Prize winner, Gilead in prose or story, as tragic as it was. The one passage that stood out was the description of the grandfather’s descent into dementia as a physical disappearance, that he slowly faded out of sight, something that would have been the basis for an outstanding short story but was an afterthought of a few pages in this work.

The Optimist’s Daughter begins with the title character, Laurel, leaving Chicago to be at her father’s side as he heads in for what should be a routine operation on a diseased eye, but something goes awry during his recovery and he dies, leaving Laurel back in her old hometown with her overgrown-child stepmother and the circle of friends Laurel left when she moved to Chicago. The stepmother, Fay, is extraordinarily selfish and immature and her presence on the pages is shrill and infuriating, as she’s just a foil for Laurel’s journey toward greater self-awareness. Laurel, meanwhile, has first to sit through the funeral and the visits of old friends who rehash her father’s life, at times puncturing her gilded memories of her father and her late mother and their picture-perfect marriage that was anything but. She then finds herself alone in the house for several days before Fay’s return, ultimately looking through some of her father’s things and old papers to get an even greater understanding of her own family heritage, eventually experiencing a catharsis over a butcher-block bread board her own late husband had made as a gift for her mother but which Fay has defaced through her own ignorance.

If anything, The Optimist’s Daughter is too short, as no character but Laurel has any depth, and her path through the house seems so light on detail that it was hard to see how she was deriving any insight or solace from much of what she saw or learned. It was an easy read, with Southern prose that reminded me somewhat of Toni Morrison despite the difference in race between the authors and characters, but felt insubstantial at the end.

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→ December 23, 2010
→ By

Turn, Magic Wheel.

Today’s chat transcript is up. No chat next week between the holidays.

—

“Would a woman like Effie Callingham, a fine woman like her, would she fall in love with a plain bounder?”
“Why not?” said Dennis with a shrug. “When did women ever fight over a Galahad?”

Dawn Powell has, in the last twelve months, become my favorite female American novelist, a writer whose books consistently deliver unusual and interesting characters, featuring Manhattan in its literary golden age, written with a sardonic wit male writers would be hard-pressed to match. She is the Queen of Snark, more than happy to turn her acerbic eye on her own social scene, and in Turn, Magic Wheel, she is positively savage.

Drawing its title from “The Sorceress,” a bucolic poem by Theocritus that includes the repeated line “Turn, magic wheel, draw homeward him I love,” Turn, Magic Wheel covers a group of writers, wannabe writers, publishers, and hangers-on in New York around the time that Dennis Orphen, a fictional writer who made a cameo appearance in The Wicked Pavilion, has written a fictionalized biography of his friend, Effie Callingham, long separated from her famous, Hemingway-like husband Andy Callingham, now presumed in Europe with the woman for whom he left Effie. The book is days from publication and Effie is just learning that it’s about her, too thinly disguised to fool anyone, which will put her at the center of a storm of publicity.

In addition to the phonies and schemers are the lovers, including Dennis’ married lover Corinne, whose husband, Phil, is the most oblivious cuckold imaginable, while Corinne herself is unaware she’s just a physical thing for Dennis, who comes closest to actual affection for Effie. Meanwhile, Effie is pulled to the hospital when Andy’s second wife – not that he ever divorced the first – turns up in New York with terminal cancer, having left Andy (before she knew she was ill) because he took up with a Swedish chorus girl.

Powell inserts herself more into this book than the four other novels I’ve read, through the Orphen character and through her sendup of New York publishers, including the fatuous publisher Mactweed and his ambitious associate Johnson, always fearing for his position while he tries to gauge the direction of the literary wind. Orphen is the anti-romantic chronicler of his New York life, but had to fill in some missing gaps in Effie’s history for his novel, only to find himself confronted with the real-life analogues to his fictional characters and settings:

He shouldn’t have come in here, anyway, he thought, for there was in his novel no role for Dennis Orphen; he had no business following his heroine brazenly through her own secret story. Wells wouldn’t do such a thing. Proust wouldn’t have. No decent author would step brashly, boldly into his own book.

Step he does, of course, often leaving him dissembling about his identity and connection to Effie to avoid detection as the parodist of his hosts, but also to chase Effie when she abandons him (never for long) over some slight … like turning her life into a satirical novel without asking her first.

Turn, Magic Wheel rivals her best work, A Time to Be Born, for its cynical view of love. But it’s inarguable that love can be born and die as a living organism, beyond the control of its owners, and for Powell the writer, the end of love means an honest exploration of emotional pain. When Effie hears Andy’s second wife, slightly delirious from the cancer, echo as her own Effie’s wish that she had borne Andy a son so she would still have something of him, Powell writes:

There are words that cannot be borne, suggestions so burning with anguish and despair that no heart can endure them, so Effie, her lover stolen, her dream of a son now stolen, got to her feet and motioning, speechless, that she was leaving, found her way out of the intolerable room.

I’d still suggest that anyone who has yet to read any Dawn Powell novels begin with A Time to Be Born, which is a lock for the next Klaw 100, a wicked satire that functions more completely as a novel with real narrative greed and a protagonist you can actually support (even if she’s not completely innocent herself). Turn, Magic Wheel might be too biting for some readers – although I suppose if you’re here you’re not opposed to heavy use of snark – and doesn’t have as strong of a central character, with the city perhaps the real star of the book. It is, however, more evidence of the greatness of Dawn Powell, one of the most under-read authors I’ve ever encountered.

Next up: I finished Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers (just $5.98 right now, although I should warn you I didn’t love the book) on the train yesterday, and started Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

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→ December 15, 2010
→ By

The Little Sister.

I’m back at mental_floss today with an article about the designing of the game Dominion, based on an email exchange I had with designer Donald X. Vaccarino.

—

“Do you drink, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Well, now that you mention it–”
“I don’t think I’d care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco.”
“Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?”

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe isn’t just hard-boiled – he’s dry, sarcastic, self-effacing, and mercurial, making him one of the most compelling protagonists I’ve found in any novel in any genre. Consigning Chander’s novels to the detective-fiction bin does him a great disservice, as his greatness is in his mastery of the language; not only is the prose itself readable and rich with metaphor, but it becomes the tool by which Chandler creates well-rounded characters through a handful of seemingly effortless lines.

I understand that The Big Sleep is considered Chandler’s best work, and it is phenomenal … but there’s little to no difference between that and Farewell, My Lovely, or the work I just finished over the weekend, The Little Sister. They’re all superb, all following the basic Chandler template of putting Marlowe in a situation where the line between solving the case and saving his life is blurry.

In The Little Sister the titular character – quoted above – shows up in Marlowe’s office, asking the gumshoe to help find her older brother, who has disappeared in Bay City not long after leaving his family in Manhattan, Kansas. Marlowe takes the case against his better judgment (S.O.P. for him), even though he believes the girl is holding back information. With a modest amount of investigating, Marlowe ends up in the middle of a blackmail scheme, a dope ring, and a lot of questionable identities – something Chandler creates in his usual economical way, with just a handful of new characters outside of a few corpses.

I picked the wrong time to read The Little Sister by starting it on day one of the winter meetings, which left me very little time to actually read the book until the meetings ended on Thursday – frustrating when it’s a book you never want to put down in the first place. I found it moved more quickly than The Big Sleep, but the plot was a little less complex – it was relatively easy to figure out what most of the characters were up to, and I say that as someone who almost never figures things out in books – so the question of which is the better book is one of personal taste. (It’s possible that The Big Sleep enjoys its status at the top of Chandler’s canon because of its film adaptation, directed by Howard Hawks with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe.) No matter where you start, though, if you haven’t given Chandler at least one shot, I can’t recommend his work highly enough.

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→ December 14, 2010
→ By

The U.S.A. Trilogy.

My Cliff Lee analysis from last night is up for Insiders, as is a piece from earlier on Monday on Scott Downs, Brendan Ryan, and Ryan Theriot, featuring a TOOTBLAN reference.

–

John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy – The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money – is considered a landmark in American fiction, ranking 68th on the Novel 100, 23rd on the Modern Library 100, and 55th on the Brit-lit-skewed Guardian 100. Leading literary lights from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer have praised Dos Passos’ writing in U.S.A. and the influence the work had in bringing modernism to the American novel. Taken in sum, this series of interconnected stories presents a panoramic view of the United States from the start of the Great War to the end of the Roaring 20s, where the main character is the scene and setting rather than any individual in the book. It’s not an easy read – more on that in a moment – but it is an important read if you read as a student rather than just for pleasure. (Not that there’s anything wrong with reading just for pleasure, of course.)

(Aside: The Novel 100 is back in print after several years out of it. The book, by literature professor Daniel Burt, ranks the 100 greatest novels ever written with an essay on each, and features a bonus, unranked list of the “second 100” after those. It’s been a great reading list for me, and I enjoy Burt’s analyses and comments on each book’s influence, even if I don’t always agree with his selections.)

Each book in the trilogy includes lengthy chapters following a dozen or so characters whose lives intertwine and whose paths cross with major historical figures, such as the young idealist who ends up working publicity on the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti. These chapters, heavy on descriptive prose, are bookended by two types of mini-chapters, the Newsreel and “The Camera Eye.” The former is a list of clipped fragments from newspaper and magazine articles of the time, anchoring you to a specific year or month while also setting up some of the emotional framework for the chapter to follow; the latter is a somewhat indecipherable stream-of-consciousness, worm’s-eye view of society that I found myself skimming because it gave me bad memories of struggling through Ulysses last winter. Dos Passos also inserts short, stylized biographies of important Americans of the time period, from Henry Ford to Woodrow Wilson to Frederick Taylor to now-forgotten names like dancer Isadora Duncan and labor activist Joe Hill, written with an opinionated voice that also seeks to inform.

Dos Passos also based large chunks of the books on his own experiences in World War I as part of the volunteer ambulance corps in Paris – a role that seems to have required a lot more drinking and carousing than actual ambulance-driving, but one that also seems to have fueled the book’s derogatory portraits of upper-class American twits in Europe, chasing money or skirts or good times while there was a war going on around them.

What I didn’t like about U.S.A. was the lack of a central story, or even set of stories. The existential nature of the trilogy means characters wink in and out of the book and Dos Passos gives a lot of time to mundane matters without investing the reader at all in anyone’s fate or happiness – because, I presume, that wasn’t his point. Dos Passos set out to provide a slice of life, and I’m not sure any American writer has done it better – but it makes for a more academic read than a leisurely one, a trilogy you might pick up to help you better follow the transition in American literature from the 1920s to the 1940s, but not something you’re going to grab to get you through your next long plane ride.

My other regret about U.S.A. is that Dos Passos didn’t use more dialogue, because he was pretty sharp with it and could have given more depth to his characters just by having them speak more often, such as in this banter from 1919 regarding the League of Nations:

“It’s not the name you give things, it’s who’s getting theirs underneath that counts,” said Robbins.
“That’s a very cynical remark,” said the California woman. “This isn’t any time to be cynical.”
“This is a time,” said Robbins, “when if we weren’t cynical we’d shoot ourselves.”

Baseball does come up a few times in the book, as one character is a serious fan (right around the time of the Black Sox scandal, after which baseball earns scant mention – you’d think Babe Ruth would show up in some Newsreels, right?) while the section in The Big Money on Frederick Taylor claims that

At Exeter he was head of his class and captain of the ballteam, the first man to pitch overhand. (When umpires complained that overhand pitching wasn’t in the rules of the game, he answered that it got results.)

And if you’re into food, U.S.A. introduced me to “smearcase,” which can refer to a sort of farmer’s or cottage cheese among the Pennsylvania Dutch, but which in the Baltimore area refers to something more akin to cheesecake. (The name comes from the German Schmierkäse, meaning smear-cheese.)

Next up: I’ve finished Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister and am most of the way through Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel. Both authors are among my favorite American writers, Chandler for his phenomenal prose, Powell for her sardonic wit.

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→ October 31, 2010
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Bridge of Sighs.

I started Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs ready to joke in my writeup that, in book reviews, “ambitious” is merely a euphemism for “long.” I’ve read the five novels that precede this one on Russo’s bibliography, including the amazing, Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, and while I think his books are smart, funny, and deep, I did not consider them “ambitious.” Bridge of Sighs, as you have probably guessed by now, is a work of great ambition, a sprawling modern epic with multiple foci, exploring themes of love, betrayal, mortality, meaning, and hate across more than fifty years in a small, dying town in upstate New York.

That town, Thomaston, is the birthplace of the two men at the center of the book, narrator Lou C. (“Lucy,” a nickname he never wanted or liked) Lynch and his on-and-off childhood friend Bobby Marconi. Shifting among three narratives, Russo tells their stories, weaving them together and tearing them apart, using Lucy’s own memoir-in-progress for the history of Lucy, Bobby, and their incredibly different families; jumping to the third person for the present-day perspective on Lucy’s strained marriage to his high school sweetheart, the almost too-perfect Sara; and Bobby, now a world-renowned painter living in Europe and contemplating the nearing end of his career and his life while he fights an undetermined health issue.

Russo eschews the easy plot device of having everything look perfect on the surface, only to shock the reader by showing how imperfect everything is; he makes it clear from the start that Lucy and Bobby are both damaged people, and lets the gradual revelations of major events from their childhoods provide the surprises, tossing in a little narrative greed as he goes. You don’t actually find out what happened between Bobby and his father until roughly 90% of the way through the book, but you can start to create and fill in an outline just by watching the evolution of their relationship. Lucy presents himself at the start as a married father and successful local businessman, but how successful and how happy are questions that open up as the story develops. Complicating his history and tying the two estranged friends together is Sara, who came from a broken home of her own, adopted the Lynches as a surrogate family as she dated Lucy, but found herself drawn to the raw, emotional Bobby when he reappears for their senior year of high school.

The contrast between the safe, steady affection between Sara and Lucy and the seething rage that emanates from Bobby is a central theme for Russo, who never seems to favor the measured (or bottled up) Lynch style over the open, dangerous emotions of Bobby:

It was amazing, when you thought about it, how effortlessly hate slipped into the space reserved for love and vice versa, as if these two things, identical in size and shape, had been made compatible by design. How satisfying a substitute each was for the other.

But rather than mire the story in a love triangle, or a tragic romance, Russo folds that into the comfortable ground of the yearnings of kids in a small, failing industrial town – Thomaston’s main industry, a tannery, slowly heads for extinction all while polluting the river and raising the town’s cancer rates – for something more than the hamlet can offer them. In Bridge, however, Russo moves those sentiments around; sometimes it’s the kids racing to get out of Dodge, but as often it’s their parents hoping their children leave for something better, all while they try to figure out a way to survive financially in a local economy that keeps shrinking. Lucy’s father, a hopeless optimist, loses his milkman job to modernization, only to buy a corner market as A&P locates the town’s first supermarket out by the highway. That corner market becomes the central hub of action as the kids go through junior high and high school – taking the place of the diner that lies at the heart of most Russo novels – but the work the Lynches put into it, and the role it ends up playing in their lives, symbolizes the work required to keep a marriage of two seemingly incompatible people together, even in unfavorable circumstances.

Another theme, perhaps coming from Russo’s own advancing age, is one of regret even for a life lived well – a “road not taken” question that Bobby and Sara in particular end up facing, although Lucy has his own questions about what might have been and even his mother and uncle (the roguish Dec, a classic Russo character) end up in the act. Sara’s parents seemed very two-dimensional, but I thought they might represent Russo’s unflattering takes on two extreme life paths – her angry, faithless, emotionally distant father on one side, and her unsatisfiable, self-serving, emotionally stunted mother on the other – that, I suppose, help explain why Sara is so grounded, so clear, and so able (mostly) to be happy with where she is and what she has.

If I have a criticism of Bridge of Sighs, it’s that Russo’s trademark humor is so much less in evidence. If Straight Man is his funniest work, this is probably his most serious. The gags are often little verbal jabs, rather than the slapstick and broad farce that characterizes his earlier novels:

After all, it wasn’t just people in big cities who had big dreams. Wasn’t her father himself a perfect example? Though he considered himself an urbanite, he’d grown up, as her mother had delighted in reminding him back when they were still living as husband and wife, on Staten Fucking Island.

I laughed, but hey, if you haven’t been caught in traffic on the Staten Island Expressway, that might not be quite so funny.

I’m barely doing the serious side of this book justice, however; it’s deeper and more literary than even Empire Falls, even if it’s not quite as exhilarating a read. The prose is classic Russo, as are the many full-fleshed characters, the setting, and the very realistic dramas that drive the book. If it’s a little less witty than normal, he has at least made up for it through his ambition.

Next up: I finished Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, which I would certainly recommend to those of you who collected cards in your youths or are simply interested in baseball history; and have just barely begun Abdelrahman (or Abdul Rahman or Abd el-Rahman) Munif’s Cities of Salt­, which appears on the Novel 100 list at #71.

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